Educational Social Software Edmedia 2007

Social Learning 2.0 Ed-Media 2007 Terry Anderson with lots of help from Jon Dron Slides available at slideshare.com

Presentation Overview
Traditional Opening Joke
Setting the Context
Affordances of the Web
Emerging Pedagogies
Granularity of Social Learning 2.0
Social Learning 2.0 across:
Personal Learning Environments
Formal education delivery
Institutional learning
Design principles for educational social software
Adoption context and ways forward

Why is E-Learning Better Than Sex?
If you get tired, you can stop, save your place and pick up where you left off.
You can finish early or take the time your need without feeling guilty.
You can get rid of any viruses you catch with a $50 program from McAfee
With a little coffee you can do it all night.
You don’t usually get divorced if your spouse interrupts you in the middle of it.
And If you're not sure what you are doing, you can always ask your tutor.

Values
We can (and must) continuously improve the quality, effectiveness, appeal, cost and time efficiency of the learning experience.
Student control and freedom is integral to 21 st Century life-long education and learning.
Education for elites is not sufficient for planetary survival

The Net Changes Everything!
Affordances of the Net, Net 2.0, e-learning 2.0, Semantic web and related other acronyms:
Content
Communication &
Agents
(Anderson and Whitelaw, 2004)
New pedagogies

Affordance 1. - Massive Amounts of Content
Any information, any format, anytime, anywhere
Customizable content
Interactive content
User created content
Wiki-everything
Open access content

A Tale of 3 books Open Access 84,000 downloads plus indiv. chapters 350 hardcopies sold @ $50.00 Free at cde.athabascau.ca/online_book Commercial publisher 934 copies sold at $52.00 Buy at Amazon $$$ E-Learning for the 21 st Century Commercial Pub. 1200 sold @ $135.00 2,000 copies in Arabic Translation @ $8.

Open Access Press
New Distance Education and Educ. Technology series www.aupress.ca

Content - conclusion
Cheap or free
Need to learn to develop business models, technologies and culture allowing us to share and re-use content and learning designs
Don’t build your value on your content
Content is necessary, but not sufficient, to create a quality educational experience

Affordance #2 High Quality, Low Cost Communication
Multi mode
Synchronous, asynch
Text, audio, video multi-media
A2A (avatar to avatar)
Stored, indexed and retrievable
Reflective, emotive and cognitive
Mobile
Embedded & Pervasive
Learner, teacher, community and commercially created

Chaz Maloney www.slideshare.net/ccosmato/conferencing-on-the-cheap-with-web-2

Challenge: Creating Incentives to Sustain Meaningful Contribution The New Yorker September 12, 2005

What’s so great about Face-to-Face?
“ I learned more about Clive by reading his introduction tonight online than I did in our entire course together last summer ”
(Kerlin, R-A, 1997) http://kerlins.net/bobbi/research/diss/

Affordance 3 Agents
Google Alerts
MeetingWizard
RSS
Athabasca
Freudbot AIML
E-Advisor
Are you ready for AU ? Agents

Affordances of the Educational Semantic Web (Anderson & Whitelaw, 2004) Content Communication Agents WIKI Blogs FaceBook Del.icio.us Flicker Filtering SecondLife Calendaring Geotracking Learning Email, Skype, IM Learning Objects Open Access Press Google Alert RSS

Emerging Pedagogies
Connectivism – “Knowledge exists in the network” (Siemens, 2005)
Community of Inquiry – Garrison and Anderson, 2003
Integrating online learning – pedagogy of nearness Mejias, 2005
Participatory Culture – Jenkins 2006
New Learning Environments John Seely Brown, 2006
Our educational discourse is largely stuck in a time warp, framed by issues and standards set decades before the widespread use of the personal computer, the Internet, and free trade agreements.” Stewart and Kagan (2005)

Interaction Models of Learning
Effective interaction between and among learners, content and teachers makes authentic learning happen.

Learner Teacher Content Educational Interactions Learner / teacher Teacher / content. Teacher / teacher Content / content Learner / learner Learner / content
Anderson (2002) Equivalency Theorem

Learner Teacher Content Educational Interactions Learner / teacher Teacher / content. Teacher / teacher Content / content Learner / learner Learner / content
Group as educational actor Jon Dron, 2007

Learner Teacher Content Learner / teacher Teacher / content. Teacher / teacher Content / content Learner / learner Learner / content
Group as educational actor Stephen Downes, 2006 network Stephen Downes, 2006

Learner Teacher Content Learner / teacher Teacher / content. Teacher / teacher Content / content Learner / learner Learner / content
Group as educational actor Anderson & Dron, 2007 collective Dron & Anderson

Models of the Many “ Collective representations exist outside of individual consciences, it is because they derive not from individuals taken one by one, but from their interaction, which is very different” Émile Durkheim Sociologie et Philosophie (1924 -1963, translation Masse

Collective Conscious
“ Being placed outside of and above individual and local contingencies, it sees things only in their permanent and essential aspects, which it crystallizes into communicable ideas. … it alone can furnish the minds with the moulds which are applicable to the totality of things and which make it possible to think of them " ( Durkheim 1954 (1912), p.444 ” ).
...The state of anomie is impossible whenever interdependent organs are sufficiently in contact and sufficiently extensive. (Durkheim 1972, p. 184 The Division of Labor in Society)

Evolutionary Model Of Collective Conscious Creation (from Durkheim) Mechanistic Organic Emergent Primitive, similarity, dependence Family, tribe and religion orientated Modern Specialization Division of Labour Mass media, State institutions Post modern, Net Based, networked, ubiquitous, weak and strong links, Syndication & Aggregation , Individuated media, Collective Consciousness

Taxonomy of the ‘Many’ Dron and Anderson, 2007 Group Conscious membership Leadership and organization Cohorts and paced Rules and guidelines Access and privacy controls Focused and often time limited May be blended F2F Metaphor : Virtual classroom

Group Network Shared interest/practice Fluid membership Friends of friends Reputation and altruism driven Emergent norms, structures Activity ebbs and flows Rarely F2F Metaphor: Virtual Community of Practice

Metaphor: Wisdom of Crowds Group Network Collective ‘ Aggregated other’ Unconscious ‘wisdom of crowds’ Stigmatic aggregation No membership or rules Augmentation and annotation through use Data Mining Never F2F

Social Learning 2.0 Dron and Anderson, 2007 Collective Group Network

Social Learning 2.0
Each of us participates in Groups, Networks and the Collective.
Learning is enhanced by exploiting the affordances of all three sources of social learning.
Issues, memes, opportunities and learning activities arise at all three levels of granularity.
Certain network tools are optimized for each level of granularity - Can they be appropriated for effective use?

Choosing the right tool? http://www.go2web20.net 1313 logos as of June 22, 2007

Social Learning 2.0 Applications in Educational Contexts Organizational Learning Formal Education Personal Learning Environments Collectives Networks Groups

Formal Education and Groups:
Comfortable, classes and cohorts
Increases:
completion rates,
achievement
satisfaction ( Jung, Choi, Lim, and Leem (2002)
Same logistic challenges as for institutional, campus -based learning
Can operate ‘behind the garden wall” to allow freedom for expression and development
Refuge for scholarship

Formal Learning and Groups
Longest history of research and study
Need to optimize:
Social presence
Cognitive presence
Teaching presence (Communitiesofinquiry.com)
Established sets of tools –
LMS
Synchronous (video & net conferencing)
Email

Problems with Groups
Confining in time, space pace, & relationship
Often overly confined by teacher expectation and institutional curriculum control
Foster learner dependencies
Isolated from the world of practice
Paulsen 1993 Relationships

Challenges of using informal social software tools for formal group tasks
Control
Support
Privacy
Assessment
Ownership and perseverance

Example: How are Blogs used in Groups?
“ You are required to post at least two messages to your blog and respond to the postings of at least two other enrolled students.
Please use your postings to address the issue discussed on pages 34-38 of your text.
Your post and responses will be assessed for 10% of your final grade
To protect your privacy, your blog is not accessible outside of the LMS and postings will be destroyed at the end of the course.”
Paraphrased from major UK university graduate school requirements

Assessing Reflective writing
If we don’t assess the blog, will students use them??
“ It is important to distinguish from the start journals that are essentially available for public or semi-public inspection and those which are designed to prompt reflection. It is misleading to treat all forms of journal writing as equivalent to each other.” Boud , 2001
Only learners should be able to decide on the audience - no-one; everyone (including Google); teacher; class; parents; etc.) Elgg has this capacity.

2. Formal Learning with Networks
Each of us may belong to many networks
Networks use and create artifacts, that are searchable
Networks connect self-paced and independent learners
Network leadership arises in multiple formats
Supported by multiple, mostly free communications
Allows connectivism to flourish (Siemens 2006) “It is not what you know, but who you know to ask.”

Formal Education and Networks (cont.)
Provides resource from which students’ extract information
In school one should learn to build, contribute to and manage one’s networks
Through exposure, provides application and validation of information and skills developed in formal learning
Basis for ongoing support and advise from alumni and professional communities

Network Tools
Most web 2.0 apps including:
Profiles: Finding significant others
Blogging - outside the garden wall
Recommendation systems (Slashdot, Diigo, Diig, Cite-u-like)
Scheduling meet-ups for study, debate, collaboration
Connecting people and resources - syndicating

Network Learning Applications
Examples:
Extract and comment on a themes from last month’s IT Forum – blog results
Create an analysis of affordances of Second Life for educational purposes – blog results
Search and summarize from Technorati the roll-out of OLPC $100 laptop program?
Using quotes from Hansard and Members Blogs, define the Conservatives’ position on global warming, and blog preliminary results for group and network feedback

3. Formal Education and Collectives
Personal and collaborative search and filter for learning tasks
Smart retrieval from the universal library of resources – human and learning objects
Requires high skill and literacy skills to effectively extract
Requores contribution to the collective (tagging, sharing whenever possible, leaving traces)
(only 16% of users are taggers (Pew, 2005)
Allows discovery and validation of academic norms, values and paradigms

Collective Application - Amazon

Example 2 Wisdom of Crowds
“ The concept is simple but brilliant; Ask enough people simple yes or no questions with knowledge of the demographic data of those you ask and you create an extremely useful resource.
Offer those same people access to the data they've helped build
Let those same people define the questions they're asked and you've created a self-propelling phenomenon that taps the wisdom of diverse communities.” http://www.downloadsquad.com

Unplanned, unanticipated encounters are central to democracy itself. Such encounters often involve topics and points of view that people have not sought out and perhaps find quite irritating. They are important partly to ensure against fragmentation and extremism, which are predictable outcomes of any situation in which like-minded people speak only with themselves (Sunstein, 2001, P.8)

How do you design effective activities for Groups, Networks and the Collective ??

Design principles for Social Learning 2.0
Emergence, Evolution and Complexity:
Principle of Adaptability ;
Principle of Evolvability;
Principle of Stigmergy
(from FLYTREE ) (Dron, 2007)

Architecture and Design;
Principle of Constraint,
Principle of Parcellation;
Principle of Scale .
(Dron, 2007)

Social Psychology & community,
Principle of Sociability
Embedded opportunity for building relationships ;
Principle of Trust –
personal control
Photo by Eye Press. (Dron, 2007)

Design principles for Social Learning 2.0 (Dron, 2007)
Networking Theory
Principle of Connectivity
all components linked (syndicated) to each other
OpenID Windley (Dron, 2007)

Steven Warburton, 2007

Are Social Networking and Collective activities Disruptive Technologies?
Start out as not being good enough for the established market
Have scalability, mass production advantages
Appeal to non traditional consumers
Not understood by mainstream organizations
Clayton M. Christensen Disruptive Technologies: Catching the Wave , his 1997 book The Innovator's Dilemma .

Should you establish a formal institution presence in FaceBook?
Is it ‘their space’ or ‘our space’ or ‘everyone’s space’??
Where will Facebook be in 12 months?

Don’t Expect help from your IT department
“ in the bowling alley (pre tornado, rapid adoption phase) you are asking a company to adopt a new paradigm in advance of the rest of the market. This is not in the interest of the IT department. It means extra work for them, and it exposes their mission-critical systems to additional risk.
Far better for them is to stay with their current paradigm a while longer, experimenting with the new one off line, but not embracing it. Instead you must turn to the end-user community." p. 46-47
Moore’s 1995 Inside the Tornado

Strategies for Early Adopter Leaders
Use the tools you want others to explore
Develop learning activities in new Network and Collective spaces
Develop an action or design-based research program to validate and learn from your interventions
Communicate the results through your networks

Importance of this issue
Educational challenges are not met through evangelism, threats or technologies alone.
Change happens when teachers, administrators and learners make it happen
Perceived benefits – Personal
Readiness - Organizational
Pressure – Inter-organizational
Chwelos; Benbasat; Dexter, 2001)
Each of us is an agent of change

Conclusion: Benefits of Using Social Learning 2.0 tools and concepts
Lifelong learning skill
Enhances involvement with and awareness of learning processes –unfreezes old patterns
Creates legacy and real world artifacts
Supports collaborative and reflective learning
Increases integration with institution, teacher, other students across the taxonomy of the Many

“ "He who asks a question is a fool for five minutes; he who does not ask a question remains a fool forever." - Chinese Proverb Terry Anderson [email_address] Blog: terrya.edubogs.org Your comments and questions most welcomed!

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Educational Social Software Edmedia 2007

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